SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories from the Lotus Sutra

Dogen-Zenji so cherished the Lotus Sutra that he actually carved a selection of it into his door. This, the core text of not only Zen but the whole of Mahayana Buddhism, has never lost its appeal among practitioners of the Way. Join us for our SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories From the Lotus Sutra led by Sensei Joshin Byrnes, Sensei Genzan Quennell

A Place to Stand: Jimmy Santiago Baca

Please welcome poet and recipient of the prestigious International Award
Jimmy Santiago Baca
to Upaya Zen Center for a special dharma talk entitled
The Ring in the Bell’s Steel: Learning to Trust our Voices.
He will also share a clip of the forthcoming
documentary about his life, A Place to Stand.
Saturday, September 20th from 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Please RSVP to our front office at 505-986-8518 ext. 11

A reflection on Jimmy Santiago Baca’s brilliant memoir A Place to Stand, adapted in a soon-to-be released documentary

by Áine McCarthy

This is the remarkable story of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s life. From the strong clear voice of his adulthood, artfully bearing witness with the written word, he tells of his childhood, how as a boy he overheard his mother being raped, how he and his mother visited his father in jail after he’d been arrested for drunk driving when he was five years old. He describes the despair he saw in his father’s eyes at that time, and how, in time, his own eyes would come to reflect that same kind of despair, just as he would find himself locked up behind the same bars (3). He tells of the ways each of his parents abandoned him and his siblings, sending them to live with their grandparents, with whom he shared loving relationships. With vividness, he paints loving portraits of each of these people in his life, their spirits and their struggles. He relives the traumatic death of his grandfather and how, in the wake of it, he and his siblings were sent to live at a religious orphanage. “When I asked the nuns if my parents were coming back, I was told the matter was in God’s hands and children shouldn’t ask such questions. God knew what he was doing. I should consider myself blessed, because God had something special in store for me. I felt lost and confused around grown-ups. They never told the truth. They were always hiding something that would eventually hurt me,” (19).

Later, after running away from the orphanage, he remembers, “My parents never did come, and at thirteen years old I found myself behind bars for the first time, in a detention center for boys. The bars weren’t there to keep us in so much as to remind us that we weren’t really wanted anywhere else,” (20). When forced to move cells in prison years later and triggered by the sight of a the box in which he would move his things, he reflects, “Everywhere I went, I arrived and left with a box; it reminded me that I had no place in this world, that no one wanted me… Psychic wounds don’t come in the form of knives, blades, guns, clubs; they arrive in the form of boxes—boxes in trucks, under beds, in my apartment when I could no longer pay the rent and had to move,” (243). Touching on these many transitions and the pain of each, Jimmy recounts his young adult life, his time in California; his involvement with selling marijuana and the increasingly chaotic lifestyle that work created. He tells of how, after a terrifying drug experience, he made plans to move back to New Mexico with his girlfriend and quit the business, and how—just before they had planned to leave—he is framed in a federal bust and charged as a kingpin in the heroin industry. He remembers driving to Albuquerque before turning himself in: “I was supposed to be driving this road with Lonnie to get married and settle down and prove to everyone how I had made it and how wrong they were about me… Now everyone could point and say, I knew it. I told you. He’s no good. He’s nothing but a criminal. It hurt to admit they were right. Still, I wanted to explain to someone that it was all a mistake. All I ever wanted was to have what others had. I didn’t want sympathy or pity. I just wanted a fair go at the things they had,” (87-88).

In the second half of the book he details the resulting sentence of five years he then serves at an Arizona state prison. “I landed there…by being a poor kid with too much anger and the wrong skin color and by fucking up again, though this time I was innocent of the specific charges against me. I was only twenty-one years old, still young, but by then I had already served a long apprenticeship in jail time… No, prison was not new to me when I arrived at Florence; I had been preparing for it from an early age,” (4). He charts his descent into “the most frightening nightmare I ever experienced” that was prison. In this poem, “They Only Came to See the Zoo” he writes about a group of legislators that passed through his cell block, at one point:

…Did you tell them
Hell is not a dream
And that you’ve been there?
Did you tell them? (232)

He retells the stories of the time spent in isolation that followed committing violent acts of self-defense, and the countless threatening confrontations that surrounded and ensnared him. At one point, he talks about overhearing a man on his tier he thought he knew well, Bonafide, brutally raping his new cellmate, “pulverizing him,” (190). Witnessing this, realizing that a totally “alien” person lived inside someone he thought he respected, filled Jimmy with “a bitter awareness that being in prison could turn a man into a monster. Somewhere deep inside myself,” he wrote, “I knew that, put in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bonafide would have tried to rape me. The rage that came out of him was the kind of rage that transcends friendship. It’s the kind of rage that can only be created in prison. The seeds of that rage are nourished by prison brutality and fertilized by fear and the law of survival of the fittest,” (191).

Determined to preserve his spirit, Jimmy teaches himself how to read and write, and thus begins the ascent of his soul, documented through the means that strengthened and transformed him. In a fateful moment where he comes close to stabbing another inmate, he hears the voices of Neruda and Lorca “praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disregard life in this manner?” (206). In this encounter, the voices of the poets guide him away from this act. In another would-be “showdown,” with several other inmates, Jimmy has a vision that comes in a series he describes as a “nervous breakdown” of sorts. Locked in the threat of their gaze, he remembers, “Suddenly, staring at them, I saw past their faces, past their flesh, into their hearts; I saw them as infants, their parents addicted to drugs, screaming and drinking,” (242). With this flash of empathy and insight, his so-called nervous breakdown abruptly ends. As his writing opens him up, he forms a profound new sense of identity based on bearing witness to the suffering of prison, in his own experience and that of those around him: “My role as witness is to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one,” (244). Writing reveals for him a path forward, and “a place to stand,” a way of compassion; he writes: “Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my past, even to wring from it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was not based on fear or bitterness or apathy but on compassionate involvement and a belief that I belonged,” (5).

Healing Earthquakes

Through little garden plots I was enchanted by
Nuns cultured at the orphanage,
Through streets torn and twisted like gnawed bark
I lived on like an insect,
Through all the writers and artists of America
Who never wrote my story,
Through all the stately documents deceiving my ancestors,

Quietly by itself are the Healing Earthquakes,
From sides it comes
Through the black-knotted drunkenness of my father,
Through the cold deep bowels of hope,
Through the trowels of sombrero’d bricklayers
And wall-builders spreading the moist mortar,
Through all the Chicanos in work T-shirts,

To the snarling guards that broke loose from their chains,
To the crumbling houses of the poor,
Through the scorpion-tailed magnums and carbines
Held at their heads by death squads,
Healing Earthquakes comes up from debris and rubble,
Splitting its own body and heart
Into a million voices and faces,
Mumbling below in its own discontinued winds,

Threading slowly my torn soul in a grip of fury,
To the eye of its mark it leans undaunted.
I am Healing Earthquakes
Not in the swirling commotion upward of the atom bomb,
Nor the blast and heraldic upshot of a rocket,
A lesser man by all the lawbooks,
A man awakening to the day with a place to stand
And ground to defend. (225-6)

This documentary A Place to Stand explores the subject of human potential will have it’s National Premiere in Santa Fe on Friday, September 26th. For more information about the film, please click here.